Abstract

During 2011, Great East Japan Earthquake in Japan, extreme liquefaction caused extensive damage to residential houses in the Kanto Plain region and resulted settlements and tilts larger than that was observed during past earthquakes. This paper deals with a proposal of ground improvement technique by installing logs into loose sand layer as a soil liquefaction countermeasure for residential houses. Small-scale shaking table tests in a 1-g gravity field were carried out using some model grounds. It was clarified that the wooden pile could increase the resistance of ground against liquefaction due to the increase of ground density by piling and the dissipation of excess pore water pressure along the surface of piles. As a result, the magnitude of settlements of the house which was set on the improved ground by piling logs became quite small.

Keywords

Notes

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the students who were graduated from Fukui National College of Technology for their cooperation in experiments. This research was partially supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C), No.19560501, Scientific Research (A), No.20246078 and Scientific Research (C), No.22560504.